Gossamer Wing 1

by Delphine Dryden

  * * *

  THOUGH THE PALAIS Garnier was in general magnificent, Charlotte had managed to see some of its least savory parts as she worked her way to the top of the building with only her sense of direction to guide her. Once she reached the final door, however, she was thwarted before reaching her rooftop goal.

  Charlotte stared at the heavily fortified barrier in mounting frustration. She had managed to pick the lock on the door itself with little trouble, but the sturdy chain and padlock that further secured it were proving insurmountable. If she couldn’t get to the roof this way, and Murcheson didn’t allow her to use the Gossamer Wing as originally planned, Charlotte had little chance of finding out whether the documents Reginald had stashed away were still there, safe in their secret nook. Nor could she look out and see what he had seen that fateful night, and feel whatever tenuous connection with him the view might bring to her.

  Charlotte knew she would have to give it up soon. If she didn’t rejoin the tour group within another few minutes, she would almost certainly be missed. For all she knew, her absence had already been noted. Perhaps she’d been followed into the group. One of those portly, comfortable tourists could be the agent on her trail and not the skeletal man at all. Shuddering at the notion, she returned her attention to the lock for one last attempt.

  The pins and tumblers defeated her efforts, and she finally gave up and retreated down the many flights of stairs until she found herself back in the hallway behind the cloakroom and toilets. She spotted the door to the lobby with a sigh of relief.

  “Puis-je vous aider, madame?”

  Charlotte jumped and whirled to find herself facing the man she’d seen outside the modiste’s.

  Time stopped for a moment while her brain registered details, as it had been trained to do. He was pale, and his unfashionably long dark hair was hanging down on one side, covering that ear and falling past his shoulder. He wore a black suit that only emphasized his lean height. When the clock of life commenced ticking again, Charlotte started backing toward the lobby door, toward safety. Relative safety, at least. Just a few yards more . . .

  “Parlez-vous Francais? You require help?” he repeated in heavily accented English.

  Where had he come from, and what had he seen?

  “N-no. Non, merci.” Charlotte donned her sweet, vapid mask, though it took even greater effort than usual with her heart racing as it was. “You gave me such a start, sir! Parlez-vous Anglais?”

  “Oui, madame.” The man gave a little bow from the waist then took a step toward her.

  “Wonderful! I seem to have taken a wrong turn and lost my tour group. We were looking at the ceilings and I couldn’t stop staring. Silly me, I never thought about it, but do you know that if you look up and turn around and around long enough, you’ll grow quite dizzy? I nearly fell over!” She was still backing up as she prattled, stealing closer and closer to the door that opened onto the lobby. “Then, I went looking for . . . well, you know. Some water to splash on my face. But I must have gone through a wrong door somewhere because there were all these stairs and at one point I was on a catwalk over the stage! Can you imagine? It took me forever to find a way back down. Oh, does this go out to the front again? Splendid!”

  She had the door open and was out in a trice without even checking to see that the coast was clear. She hoped she wouldn’t be spotted by any theater employees, but was too frantic to escape the man to care about a scolding for leaving the tour group. When she glanced back, giving a last adorable little wave over her shoulder like an ill-timed reflex, the man in black was staring at her with such cold, soulless eyes that her step faltered for a moment. A stray sunbeam from the entrance glanced across his face, lighting the side with the hidden ear, and for an instant she saw a flash there through the curtain of hair, as of light reflecting against glass or polished metal.

  Forcing a giddy grin onto her face, Charlotte turned and scampered back across the lobby and up the grand staircase to rejoin the group, feeling as though the hounds of hell might be at her heels. She would not allow herself to look back again.

  * * *

  “AT LEAST NOW I know who to be on the lookout for.”

  Charlotte didn’t feel nearly as easy as she sounded regarding her brush with potential danger. And Dexter wasn’t fooled, she suspected.

  “You continued to stroll around even after you suspected you were being followed?” He spun around, incredulous, and stood in front of her with his arms crossed, looking stern and imposing, blocking her from taking another step.

  Charlotte glanced around, hoping that anybody overhearing them would assume it was a marital spat and move along.

  “More quietly, please. Yes I did, and I learned a great deal.”

  “How so?”

  “For one thing,” she pointed out, “we know he’s more suspicious of me than of you. When we separated, he chose to follow me.”

  Dexter shrugged. “For all I know there was somebody tailing me in Gennevilliers as well. I would be much less likely than you to pick up on something like that.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. At least if there was, it was just somebody sent after you for form. Furthermore, I believe I confirmed Murcheson’s suspicion that Dubois is working with the French government.”

  Charlotte inclined her head toward the fountain that sparkled merrily in the streetlights a few dozen yards away along the walkway. Dexter followed her lead, and they found a bench beside it.

  “The sound will help mask the conversation,” she explained. “It’s shadowy here too, which may give us a bit of cover if anybody is observing us.”

  “How can you know this is the French, and not just some lackey of Dubois’s? You sound very certain. What do you know, that you haven’t been telling me?”

  She sighed, wishing she could resist the pull of her memories. She didn’t want to believe her suspicions were true, wanted to think she was being melodramatic. But Charlotte had never been melodramatic, and she was fairly sure she knew who was tailing them.

  “Reginald’s last field mission before the treaty was here in Paris, as you know.”

  Dexter nodded and gestured for her to continue.

  “He’d been following Roland Dubois as well, I gather, because at the time Whitehall thought they might be able to use him to get close to some French agent, a woman who’d apparently stolen some important laboratory notes from a scientist who was working for the British government. At any rate, that night I told you about, Reginald had an encounter with a French agent outside Dubois’s office. He recognized the man as an enemy operative and managed to take a bundle of documents from him. Reginald only got a glimpse inside the bundle, but he thought they looked like the stolen lab notes. He ran off and escaped the agent by somehow making his way to the roof of the Palais Garnier then sliding down a line on the opposite side.”

  “How the devil did he get up—”

  “I’ve no idea, and it doesn’t matter. The point is, he’d hidden the packet up on the roof, in one of a number of secure caches that our men in France had constructed for leaving messages to one another. That’s why he chose that particular building.”

  Dexter raised his eyebrows. “Reginald? It was Reginald himself who left the documents you’re here to retrieve?”

  “Yes. It was one of the reasons they assigned me. I’d worked with him, knew him, and might notice details others wouldn’t. If he’d changed any of the equipment or codes used to work the pressure locks on the cache, with my background I’d be more likely to work out what new code he’d used. Nobody ever thought to ask him while there was still time, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “I should have told you. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  Dexter didn’t respond directly to that. “Did his foe see him stashing the documents?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “Not as far as Reginald could tell, and that’s why Murcheson hopes they’re still there. Reginald’s main memory after he’d secured
the package was of turning to jump off the roof and seeing the man right behind him, hand outstretched. The wind was blowing, a snowstorm had started minutes before. Reginald said the man’s hair had blown back from his face and he had nothing but some sort of metal device where one ear had been. And the hand that reached for him, that was metal too.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Reginald saw all this for a second, at the most, before he slipped down the cord and escaped, but the image was so stark it never left him. He never knew what kept the man from cutting the cord or prying the grappling hook from the abutment. His superiors identified the man from his report once he’d returned to England.”

  Dexter took her hand in his, and Charlotte was grateful for the warmth and for the contact. “From your description of the man you saw at the Opéra, It certainly sounds like the same agent.”

  “How many claw-handed agents with advanced auditory enhancements are there in French intelligence? I’d think it had to be the same man. The simplest explanation is almost always the right one, isn’t that what they say?”

  “They say a lot of things. And that’s hardly simple, a spy who’s half automaton, following the widow of an enemy agent he killed five years ago to the same building where he had a showdown against the man two years before that. But I’d hardly claim it was impossible either. So this man is still an active field operative?”

  “No,” Charlotte admitted. “Not if it’s the same person. He hasn’t officially been an agent for the French for years. Not since the treaty. They said he went rogue, though I always had my doubts. In any case, a few weeks before we were married, Reginald’s superiors warned us that this former agent—Coeur de Fer they call him—appeared to be traveling to the Americas. Dubois was traveling there and Couer de Fer was posing as his bodyguard, but the Agency was concerned he might be tracking Reginald because of their history.”

  “Did he . . . wait, Reginald knew this man was coming?”

  “We thought we’d taken every precaution. We had security at the wedding, we employed doubles to go on the honeymoon we’d originally planned, while we took a boat to New Orleans with tickets purchased under another name at the last minute. It didn’t matter in the end. The man was obsessed, I think. He would have caught up with Reginald eventually, no matter what we’d done.”

  “It’s been years, though,” Dexter argued. “It may not be the same man after all. You never saw him yourself, correct? Besides, you were still hardly more than a girl when the treaty was signed. Why would he suspect you of anything now?”

  “I don’t know. But my showing up at the Palais Garnier can’t have looked like coincidence to him. I need to speak with Murcheson about it. If this man has already made the connection between me and Reginald, and cares enough to pursue me now, the only thing he could be after is the one thing Reginald took from him. I can only assume it would be best for our side to recover those documents now, before he takes it in mind to look around the Opéra roof for old times’ sake. I don’t think we can afford to wait for the new moon.”

  For a moment Dexter said nothing at all but just sat, frowning thoughtfully. “But then again, perhaps it wasn’t Coeur de Fer after all. Would an agent of that caliber, even a former one, make a mistake like that? Letting his cover slip, letting himself be seen by his mark? It seems like a pretty basic thing to slip up on.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was an accident,” Charlotte said. “I think he wanted me to see. Wanted me to know that he was following me. To frighten me off, or see how I would react. He likes the cat and mouse game. He likes to taunt.”

  The basis of her knowledge swirled in her head, making her ill as it always did when she allowed herself to think about it. If she had only awakened, if she had heard the door, or if she and Reginald had stayed up to make love a second time—

  “What is it?”

  Dexter’s arm was all the way around her waist now, Charlotte realized. It felt good and solid and safe. She couldn’t let herself relax into it.

  “It’s difficult to talk about,” she understated.

  That warm, strong arm tightened around her, pulling her closer. “Do you want to know what I think?”

  She looked up at him, curious. “All right.”

  “I think that man poisoned you too. Not like he did Reginald,” Dexter assured her, “but with this memory, whatever it is. I see how it haunts you, Charlotte, and it festers like any slow poison. You need to purge it. Cast it up, have it drawn. Choose your metaphor. Either way you can’t keep living with that foul rot inside your mind.”

  “You make it sound like gangrene.”

  After a long moment in which they stared at each other, Dexter chuckled and dropped his gaze. “Not the metaphor I intended.”

  “Don’t they amputate for gangrene? This memory’s in my head, Dexter. Precisely what are you suggesting?”

  “I certainly don’t advocate amputation of your pretty head. Forget the gangrene. Let’s stick to man-made poisons, and go with a purge.”

  Charlotte was astonished to realize she was smiling, even in the face of this, the stuff of her nightmares. Dexter was like a wizard, waving a wand over her soul and making the impossible seem not only possible but essential.

  Not easy, however. No magic could ever make it easy to let that story out. Charlotte had to steel her nerve and make a few false starts before she managed.

  “I was asleep,” she finally said, as though this simple fact disgusted her. “I don’t remember hearing anyone enter our cabin, although the lock was forced. Later the doctor said I’d been given a light dose of chloroform, enough to keep me from waking while . . . to keep me from waking.

  “Reginald had been given something before he was poisoned, something to paralyze him so he couldn’t struggle. But I’ve researched the substance since, and although the forensic doctor didn’t say so at the time, I know it wouldn’t have rendered him unconscious, only unable to move or speak. And why would the killer go to the trouble of procuring that particular drug, if not to wake his victim up once he was helpless? To have him know what was happening? Reginald knew, and was unable to defend himself as that fiend shot the poison into him. And I never woke up,” she whispered, because her throat was so tight the air could barely pass through it. “I was right next to him the whole time. I never saw him alive again. In the morning I found him next to me and tried . . . tried to wake him. Couldn’t wake him.”

  “Stop.”

  “The curtains to the berth were closed and it was dark, so I leaned over to try to open them and felt . . . he was so still and cold. His arm, so cold under my hand. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. I felt like we were in a coffin. I’d never seen a dead body before but I knew, even though I kept trying. I knew, I knew—”

  “Charlotte, stop. Shh, shh. Stop now,” Dexter whispered, pulling her head into his chest. She resisted for a moment then relaxed, slipping her arms around him and clinging with all her might. “I didn’t mean to make you do this here, darling. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have for all the world. I didn’t know.”

  “I’m going to cry, and I hate crying,” she explained into Dexter’s waistcoat.

  He passed her a handkerchief then wrapped his arm around her again. “I’ll pretend not to notice, then. I’ll watch the fountain, and you just let me know when you’re finished.”

  His humor and kindness broke the dam at last and Charlotte sobbed into his broad chest, no longer caring who saw, or that she was the one who had asked for no emotional entanglements.

  She wasn’t sure how long they sat like that, her weeping and Dexter pretending not to notice. He stroked her back and occasionally pressed a kiss to the top of her head, and it finally registered with Charlotte that they were in a public park where such a maudlin display was absolutely out of the question.

  Too late. She didn’t want to raise her head when the sobs finally hitched to a halt. It was all too embarrassing, and she had a horrible suspicion she’d ruined Dexter’s nice burgun
dy moiré waistcoat. His handkerchief was irrecoverably sodden. She would have to remember to buy him some new ones.

  Another kiss fell on her head, and the gentle stroking turned to a pat on the shoulder.

  “Better?”

  Dexter’s voice rumbled in his chest, enticing her to stay. Reluctantly, she nodded and straightened up, trying not to meet his eyes.

  He took her chin between his fingers and lifted it, procuring a second, clean handkerchief from parts unknown and wiping her face with it almost as though she were a child. To her astonishment, Dexter’s cheeks bore evidence of tears as well.

  “I didn’t mean to make you cry too,” she said.

  “The wind caught the spray from the fountain and it wafted into my eyes,” he replied dryly. “I really am sorry, my love. I never dreamed it was so—”

  “No, don’t apologize. I do feel better now. You were right. I needed a purge.”

  Dexter sniffled, then looked displeased with himself for doing so. “All right, then. Thank heavens it worked and we didn’t have to resort to amputation after all.”

  “That would have been tragic. The modiste I saw this morning called in a milliner in the middle of our sartorial orgy. So in addition to a great deal of clothing I’m expecting a number of very frivolous hats to arrive in a week or so. I’ll be needing my head for those.”

  “Tragedy averted,” Dexter laughed. “You’re wonderful.”

  She blinked a few times, not sure whether to reply or pretend she hadn’t heard him correctly. “Thank you,” she said at last.

  “You’re welcome.” Dexter smiled, then looked away and changed the subject. “Does our newly identified villain have a name, by the way?”

  Charlotte grimaced. “Jacques Martin. But as I said, they mostly call him Coeur de Fer. Iron Heart. I’ve no idea if it’s literally true. I suspect not. They don’t really make implants from iron, and he’d hardly be fit for spying with a mechanical heart. But the name still fits.”